Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a term for access control technologies that can be used by copyright holders, publishers and hardware manufacturers to limit the usage of digital contents and devices. The digital contents can be in the form of documents, e-books, audio, video and game, software libraries. DRM controls the access of sensitive contents by including information about the user rights (i.e. permissions, constraints and obligations) associated with that content. The digital rights management also involves cryptographic techniques and access control mechanisms for preventing unauthorized access; and control usage of contents. Such limitations include the number of copies that may be printed, whether the file may be copied, duration of the file may be accessed and whether the content may be edited.
Presently, a range of DRM solutions are available in the market. But, in most of the cases the client has to be online and connected to the server for consumption of the digital contents. There are very few offline data consumption model present in the market. But existing offline DRM solutions do not provide a uniform framework for the protection of multiple content types such as digital objects, libraries, executables etc. Their relevance and usage is restricted to a particular type of content or a selective range of content types.
In view of the foregoing discussion, there is a need for a DRM solution that can support the offline data consumption by the user, prevent the illegal exploitation of the license and can provide the uniform framework to protect digital objects and software library.